Microcosm Lecture Series Notes
Transitioning Into The Aquarian Age
Lecture 13b of 25 by [R]
Regeneration and the Aquarian Age
Because the fundamental understandings have been skewed by the Satanic and Luciferic taint of commission and omission, there is a price to all of this. The material blindness is Satanic in nature. We think we can hide things, and the emergency with which we approach everything is Luciferic. The whole idea that we can just rush forward and dispose – the whole idea of disposability instead of looking at things as cycles or spiral cycles in an integrated whole is a Luciferic idea. I can just throw this beer can out the window; it doesn’t make any difference. It’s that kind of attitude because there is not the realization of connectivity of everything in truth, of everyone in spirit—in life spirit.
Saturnus - Caravaggio
We’ve come up with these kinds of outlooks and these are the things that we have to not allow ourselves to fall into if we want to progress forward. So, we try to dispose of things, either enemies or insects or things like that. We poison ourselves and we produce devices and we produce substances with big escapist tendencies. It’s not only that we’re ashamed of the nudity and we try to cover it up with clothing or whateer other things you try to cover it up with – we try to escape from it with things like drugs and things of that nature. So, we have the same misdirected illusions that the Lucifers intended for us. We keep making more and more progress and buy sex and violence. It’s all a Luciferic progress and the Lucifer spirits like that we don’t see things that clearly. They like that we are skewed into materialism, because if we could see through all of that and recognize the unified truth to all things, the game would be up for them.
We would follow into those ways like, you know, food that has no nourishment. You can eat and eat and eat and it may taste good, but there’s no nourishment to it, so it. If we once see the unity, which is our duty to bring forth to people, that’s the end of that. We have the misdirected illusions that we were intended to have. Some of them are pretty subtle, but when you look at them they’re silly. For example, technology, take television. At one time people believed that all of the problems of the world would be solved by technology. They believed, for example, that the dishonesty in politics would be solved by the television, because you could see a candidate on the television screen and you could know when he was lying. It didn’t work; all it did was produce more sophisticated liars.
Now we think that communication is only facilitated by the internet and by cell phones, and we have all these people that are supposedly communicating with each other, but what they really are is they are very, very lonely, and they’re not saying anything significant to each other. In fact I’ve never heard anyone jabbering over a cell phone that really told them that they love them. There are all these people jabbering on the internet, and they think this is communication. Do you tweet? I don’t. The whole idea is almost funny to me.
This isn’t saying that science or technology are bad or evil or anything like that, because to say that would be wrong. It would be a sin worse than the first sin, because there would be no new actions. And there would be no new soul power that would come out of those actions. It’s not the science and technology per se, but how we go about science and technology. What are our interactions with each other, and what is the integrity of our deeds? That has to be within science and technology. It’s easy to hide behind the computer screen and not be forthcoming about who you are and not be honest about all things. All of these problems that we’ve just mentioned—pollution and things like that could be solved by technology. There are ways, even, that we could destroy radioactive nuclear waste, but it always comes down to saying, “It would cost too much.”
Well, if human life and having a concern for everything that’s living and evolving is dispensable, if it costs too much, where are our values? If we’re lying to ourselves, if we have these wrong kinds of values and we’re told openly in St. Matthew – (in the Old Testament the sin against the Holy Ghost is implied as abuse of the sexual function), but it’s in Matthew’s Gospel that we’re told literally by the biblical Christ that the sin against the Holy Ghost is lying – at the other end of the spinal fire. And so what we’re talking about is how the same creative principle, the same creative attitudes are not just merely the sexual things. They are the lying and the false values that we have applied to spiritual energy too, which is the way the Lucifers gain experience, through our reveling in excitement and emergency. That is how they grow and how they further their own evolution, at least for awhile.
Christ didn’t teach science and technology. He could have, and he even declined anything in that direction. In the Lemurian Epoch we jumped the gun with creativity and we got our entire nature out of balance. We’re morally incapable, it seems, of abstaining. We can’t abstain from things. The imbalance is that our moral nature is out of harmony with the advancement of our intellectual and desire nature. We build bombs that we can’t not use; we have all sorts of things, but we don’t seem to be working as hard on our moral and ethical development as we are in technical development.
We’re trying to talk about appropriate technology. This applies to us as spiritual students, especially, because with our knowledge we’re capable of horrendous abuse. This is why at the center of all our aspiration we have the exercises that help to purge us from all our moral and ethical deviations and to cleanse us from our desires whether they be commisive or omissive. If we don’t heed any of these things, and if we don’t respect each other, like The Rosicrucian Fellowship, we can destroy each other over petty church politics rather than just thinking about loving as much as we can and working together however we can. All right, that’s the end of the ranting and raving part. There can only be so much of that.
To repeat, our understandings now are reflective imitations. However, not all of the reflections of the mandala come through the opposition aspect. Some come through the principle of the sextile which is what we’re trying to get at. The adjacent points on the two triangles are sextiles. Sextiles indicate the reflective consciousness, but without the deadlocking opposition. They are the reflections into a new element which means a new kind of experience and looking at things in a new way. It gives you a bigger perspective and that perspective is a perspective that is closer to the perspective of the universal spirit.
There is a very broadening versatility in the sextile. It introduces us to new things and it introduces us to new ways in a complementary manner. There is a reflection, but a complementary reflection. Moreover, since the sextile figure represents the macrocosm there is for us a broadening from the dark material perspective into the softer, more-illumined, spiritual perspective. This is broadening and reflecting and expanding in the greatest sense, as when we talk of a great person or of a big man or a big woman. We’ll come back to this in a minute, but we have to go on to something else.
Let’s return to “our part of the work,” and that is the earth triangle pointing up. Even here there is frustration for the speaker, because we haven’t even glanced at the surface of this subject, and we have to now move on to something else. That’s one of the things with giving talks like this – you discover things. It’s sort of like if you’re in Carlsbad Caverns or some place like that. You walk along and suddenly discover that there’s as whole corridor down there of other places that you could go and they’re all wonderful and they have different things for the imagination to feast on. Before passing on, let’s look at one other point that seems to be important.
Saturn is at the top of the earth triangle, and Saturn represents time, Capricorn. To some extent we didn’t know time until we knew matter. By matter we mean anything concrete. Concrete worlds are the worlds of time. The transcendent worlds, especially the transcendent worlds of pure spirit, are the realms of eternity. It’s a funny thing that all of our time is measured in terms of space and matter, so there is an inseparable relationship of time with space and matter. Whereas a potential it is filled with spirit. The other triangle points downward; it points to Cancer which represents space in a sense of a womb of the spirit. We see a time/space in the vertical, the spirit/matter pole as the basis of the grand sextile as it appears in the standard position on the mandala. The vertex, is, as we have seen, connected by an opposition. There are oppositional paradoxes of both time and space; spirit and matter, intension and extension.
Let’s look at a paradox in time. That is in all of this because we jumped the gun, that is we committed, we followed the Luciferic marshal quality. We jumped ahead of time and because of that it takes us longer. It’s one of those ironies of time and space. The opposition, as we said earlier, always gives the opposite of what we’d expect. In this case it is so that when we jumped the gun we focused in a specializing way, in that Saturnine materialistic specializing way and we became ignorant to the greater cosmos and working in harmony with it and having healthy, positive cycles of experience. Like science and technology, specialized, concentrated, material consciousness is not wrong, but it is the motivation, selfishness. We were going to buy ourselves eternity, or so we thought with the part that was omitted. We weren’t told about acting ad-harmoniously with what was going on which was basically an omission.
Let’s try to get at this in another way, and that means telling a story. It’s a story from probably one of the best all-time story-tellers in history—someone who made up allegorical stories almost at the drop of a hat and they were beautifully conceived. It is from Plato who is one of the best story-tellers, and this happens to be the allegory of the cave, which I’m sure most people are familiar with. The story was told to people so that by analogy they could see just how blinded and be-rooted they were by materialism. Now, Plato was oriental in some of his thinking in that he thought that matter was an illusion – not illusory, but he thought it was an illusion. This was because he had deep spiritual experience and the nature of deep spiritual experience is that it has the character of being more real or feeling more real. It’s the same way that a materialist believes that because you can stub your toe on a stone, this indicates true reality. Someone like Plato who could see the universal ideas as they issued from the realm of pure truth which we would call the life spirit—because he had that he recognized that that was reality and comparatively speaking he thought that this world was illusion. I hope he’s been cured of that by now but that’s…….even great people make great mistakes.
This is the story of people who are imprisoned in a cave and is something like this. There are people that are chained to this wall, and all they could see was this wall. This is the opening to the cave. The light shines in and they think that light is only the reflected light on the cave wall. They see people walking along up here and they take the shadows as the reality. I don’t remember the story exactly. I think somebody escapes. He gets out and he sees the sun and he sees the sunlight and he comes back and tells them, and they don’t believe him.
They believe that these are the realities; that the shadows are the realities. Something like that is what our consciousness has come to be like. Ironically, materialistic philosopher, even those of great intelligence, don’t get the point when he’[s saying it. This is a lovely allegory, but they’re taking it as a superstitious mystical view about what truth and reality are. He was a great storyteller, but as great a storyteller as he was, he was biased by his own insight. He didn’t like painting, for example. He didn’t like painting because he thought these bodies of ours are like the shadows on the wall. They are illusions and the real people can only be seen in spirit. If someone makes a painting of someone else they’re making an illusion of an illusion. From his way of thinking that’s true, but there’s so much more to art than that and there’s so much more to insight and seeing all of that, but of course he wasn’t too big on sensory experience, and sensory experience is exceedingly important. So, as brilliant as he was and with as much insight as he had, he wasn’t perfect. We all grow and we all get better.
I have a friend at the University of Iowa who is a molecular biologist. He publishes, and publishes successfully, in experiments more than his colleagues do. He tells them outright, I do this by intuition. I have this positive attitude about their being an answer to things and the truth of things, and I intuitively know what experiments will work and what will prove to be positive.
We’re trying to get into Aquarius. Saturn is punctilious. It’s a data collector. It’s an organizer. It shares the realm of science with Uranus which is the intuitive insight person. Saturn in Aquarius is the lower lightening stroke. It’s the data master. The higher lightening stroke is Uranus. So, now we’re finally at Aquarius, however to get more deeply into Aquarius we have to again return to the mandala.
There are two ways that the double triangle can be placed on the cusps of the mandala. In the same way that this is one configuration of the sextile, there is another which is like this. We have looked at the one with the vertical. It puts the vertexes of the interlocking triangles between the fire and earth signs. When we look at the other one we are looking at the horizontal. The first way we looked at it, it is centered on the solstices. The second one where everything is centered on the horizontal is focused on the equinoxes and the cusps fall on the fire and air signs. For Aquarius that means the adjacent points on the sextile or the double trine is on the cusps of Aries and Sagittarius.
This, believe it or not is the Aries talk, in that we’ve been focusing on building and deeds instead of faith and we’re talking about a life of action. This certainly had a lot of bluster in it. That’s what an Aries talk has to be about; it has to have some bluster and scolding and things like that. I didn’t take anybody to task, because I don’t think that’s my place, but we talked about the bluster that builds up when the fiery Aries is restrained and held back by the mud of fire and water. That’s why there had to be all of this scolding. These talks are meant to be experiential. They’re meant to put our consciousness into the sign that we’re looking at relative to Aquarius so that we can really feel the spiritual environment that we’re in.
We very rarely are aware of the spiritual effects, the astrological effects that surround us. We know when we’re around somebody who’s angry, and sometimes we can feel that we’re with some really strange person. Sometimes we can feel something like Christmas or Easter or something like that, but for the most part there are all kinds of changes happening every day, but they are so subtle that we miss them. Then we wonder why we aren’t clairvoyant; it’s because we haven’t been in touch with the spiritual forces, so in these talks we’re trying to be cognizant of the nature of Aries or of the nature of Sagittarius as we give the talk.
The vertical pole is the hierarchical pole. It is the pole of stratification, of elites, of hierarchy, and that’s just what we expect with water and earth and the watery children of water. The horizontal orientation likes equality, especially the ultimate vertex. Zodiacally speaking, moving forward in the zodiac is Aquarius where there is parallelism and equality and altruism and everybody is everybody else’s friend. Aries, like the grasshopper, does leap before it looks. Aquarius leaps, but it suspends; it stays in heaven. Aries does have first-hand experience, even if that experience is science, and it’s right at the frontier. For Aries, everything has to be hands-on. “I don’t want somebody telling me what the truth is; I want to experience it myself.” Even if it’s preemptive and energy oriented more than oriented toward facts or things like that, it wants to be part of the cause – not part of the effect. So, we already feel what it is like with the energetic, positive signs. We can clearly get the idea of Aries and Aquarius in the idea of sublimation and rapid expansion which is explosion. That combination of Aries/Aquarius: great fireworks lovers; they like that explosive kind of quality.
We don’t want to spend too much tie on these simple kinds of relationships, so let’s try to get something of a more universal understanding via the mandala or else this might become just a practical astrology talk. The basic pole is the horizontal pole on the mandala. It runs between Aries and Libra, and it shows the most basic horizontal relationships. They are the “I” and “Thou” relationship. It is the two of us together. Aries in the Ascendant indicates a direct relationship with the world. “Let me see for myself.” Libra represents seeing the world through someone else’s eyes. What kind of comfort; what does the other person need?
So, it is a basic introduction to two ways of looking at the world, each of which is equally important. Having my own opinion; having my own action; and seeing through other people. The air is focused in Libra in the same way that the fire is focused in Aries. It’s “other” oriented or some times it’s “culturally” oriented. This otherness takes us outside of ourselves the same way that a friends in trouble can cause us to forget our own situation and lead us to do things of bravery that we would never do. For the love of another, we do that.
Carried to the extreme, it is the ultimate otherness of the life spirit. It is the selflessness or the definition of self in others—the universal other which is what the altruistic love is made of. Ultimately, when the Aries doing things is through the airy signs and the reflectiveness of Aquarius is brought to its ultimate in that sextile relationship, it is literally doing something for the Christ’s sake. This gives us the spirit of expansiveness that we have been looking for all night. This cramping of the mud of water and earth; now we can see the sextile expansiveness.
Now let’s take that spirit of expansiveness and see how Adam’s apron of figs has evolved into expanded technology of our time so we can use them and use them to progress in our spiritual lives and progress the whole of the collective other.
Technology is here. We cannot deny that fact. There are potential downsides to that—potential negatives and there’s always when dealing with technology, the risk of falling into the hands of Lucifer if we are not aware of them. We’re going to address only the positives, and we hope we’re not going to address the positives with Luciferic over-confidence. We only have so much time left, so let’s spend it looking at things more positive than what we have been looking at.
Adam and Eve were told that they would have to work by the sweat of their brows. And we have. And we’ve worked mightily and we’ve worked persistently. We can even move mountains. They do it in China; they cut mountains down with chain saws. Did you know that and that’s how they pave a lot of their highways? They do it with motor scooters and chainsaws. They cut out blocks and they have a continuous run of motor scooters going back and forth, each with a block on the back, and that’s the way they pave a lot of their highways.
Fortunately, in doing all of this work we have become wiser. We even use laziness, which is the reflection of overweening egoism. We have used that to make our lives better; we have more and more technology and less grunt labor. Now, some things like processed food isn’t very good, but a lot of things of technology are. In the process of developing technology we used to learn how to carry something from the very beginning to the end. That developed self-reliance in us, an artisanship. But, lest we become too self-oriented, we needed to share technology with everyone.
Mass production came along, and some people think that the idea of mass-production is demeaning or impersonal, because one thing specializes in one thing. There’s a positive side to mass production and that is – if you carry something all the way from beginning to end by yourself, there’s a certain amount of pride in craftsmanship and the ability to do the things, but if you have to rely on someone else to do their job, that’s opening to the Aquarian type of consciousness. So, even in things like assembly lines, we’re learning to trust other people.
It’s a sign of a self-made person, somebody who’s a rugged individualist who has to always be on top of everything and do things only his way and doesn’t trust other people. Robotics will probably take things a step further and nanotechnology will carry things even further. But with the technology we have to learn to shift our consciousness according to what we have learned by the technology rather than becoming the prisoner of the technology itself.
The television is a wonderful thing, as is the computer. You can get a very fine education through watching television or by working with the computer. But, what happens is we can also put ourselves into that again, escaping from the nakedness, escaping into the fantasy world of television, and we are not going forward when we do something like that. Probably the person who built the television or who designed or discovered it in the first place is the one who really gets the most out of the television, because that person understands the principle where the actors that put on the shows are getting something from the television.
What I’m trying to say here with regard to technology is we learn something from technology, but then we take that information or experience that we gain from technology and we internalize it or spiritualize it. This is what the spiritualization of matter is all about. We’re going to have more and more idleness, and right now the tendency is to escape from idleness into indulgence and entertainment. In terms of salary, entertainment figures are extremely high paid. Athletes, singers, people who entertain us (And they can’t entertain us for very long because we get bored quickly.) Ultimately, something outside of ourselves can’t entertain us. The thing is, if we work with the spiritualization of matter, what we learn from technology and from technological experiences, even cultural experiences, we internalize that, and we live that in our consciousness.
Ultimately, our work is not going to be grunt work at all. Our work is going to be in consciousness, because it is consciousness that is going to cause the mineral kingdom that we are now manipulating technologically to become plant-like. You can’t do that through technology; you can only do that through consciousness. So, the greater and greater amount of free time that we have will be spent more and more in inner work.
We should also apply what we learn from technology to our own consciousness. What is happening is that we are removed; we have this notion that we are removed from nature and that we can do with it what we want—like poison it and then eventually poison ourselves, but in this removal we enter into empty abstraction.. This is not transcendence from nature; this is an escape from nature which is again one of those things of escaping through illusion.
Through technology we can build photo-multiplier tubes that are so accurate they can sense one photon! But all of the perception is being externalized. It’s all being done by the machines, which is good for the machines, but at the same time we should ourselves be extending, not leaving it all to technology. We should be extending our own observations, out own faculties so that we not only see things by the light reflected off of them, but that we see through them, so what we learn or accomplish through technology is again something that we should find inside of ourselves.
There is nothing that we can find in the world outside of us that is not inside of us. If we are only fulfilling one side of the equation it doesn’t make any sense. We need to be internal to the degree that we are external. A lot of things in society, using technology, are forcing us into spiritual awakeness – like is happening right now with the credit card crisis. You had to have a certain kind of consciousness to barter. You had to see whether that item looked good and whether your item that you were going to trade was, you know, a worthy deal. But you can’t do everything by bartering. That’s, again, trying to do without any technological advance at all.
So, we invented currency – coins and paper, and it was something that represented something else. It was artificial; it was symbolic. Again, you can make mistakes with that, and you can print all kinds of money and then you run into inflation, but now by technology, value has become something completely invisible. When you put a credit card down, you can’t see what you’re worth. Now, it’s true they do all of this data mining. They know everything of your buying history and they know what you want and what you don’t want, and they have a really good insight into your psychology so that they can sell you more.
There’s nothing wrong with that; they’re taking advantage of people with that but, think of it. By the time the Aquarian Age is over we’re all going to have clairvoyance and none of us is going to have any secrets so that you can see that technology – even many of the things that we don’t like are things that are advancing us toward Aquarian consciousness. If you don’t have any secrets to protect; if you don’t put your fig-leaf apron on, you’re open for the world to see. You see, technology is not a bad thing, and it is through technology that we are going to advance.
The final point we want to make is that technology has to be in proportion. It has to be something that is not with that Mars attitude that we can do whatever we want and that we become techno-crazy and not responsible. We need to be self-forbearant. We need to develop technology that is good for everyone—that is good for everything and not just something that satisfies self-indulgence. It would be silly to try and become Luddites and say that technology is going to go away and we can make it go away or something like that; that’s silly. It’s more a matter of self-discipline.
You can have all kinds of temptations around you if you have inner strength, if you have inner values, if you have self-discipline, if you can control yourself and maintain yourself. And it’s very good to be in an environment with all kids of temptations because you need to learn that. There is an individual personal thing and that’s what we’re talking about when we’re talking about the cusp of Aries being sextile to the cusp of Aquarius. We’re talking about individual responsibility. We’re not talking about inaction; we’re talking about action in which a person is completely self-conscious of what the result of his actions will be with regard to the whole.
That’s a very important thing, and this is why I think as far as the Aquarian Age is concerned, the appropriate technology has as its slogan what I think is the perfect kind of slogan. It says, “Think globally (which is Aquarius), but act locally.” (locally right within your own being, which is Aries, the personality.) So, we can do wondrous transformations. We’re even going to have to do (in order to clean up the mess that we’ve made so that things can go on), we’re going to have to do some wondrous things. So, instead of being Aries-like in having technology be a fad, it can be translated into creative novelty. Creativity novelty as when in the Book of Revelation, the being that is to represent Christ says, “Behold, I make all things new.”
[Illustrations were not part of the lecture.]